Anthony Albanese on Sunday will unveil its “Future Made in Australia Skills Plan” which will deliver up to 20,000 extra university places and fund 465,000 free TAFE places
The subsidies for student places up to 2024 fall about $1.1 billion short of the level needed to create the extra places the government promised its Job-ready Graduates policy would deliver.
A capital funding squeeze led universities to seek new ways of developing their campuses. It now appears city CBDs and developers might do better out of those deals than universities.
The sameness of the way in which universities present themselves is based on a shared view of what they think stakeholders want. Behind the official facade it’s more like ‘organised anarchy’.
Facing protests by students and academics over its Liberal Party links and generous funding by the Morrison government, the centre’s most important test will be whether it respects academic freedom.
The Job-Ready Graduates policy aims to remove ‘the misalignment between the cost of teaching a degree and the revenue that a university receives to teach it’. But new research challenges its costings.
The budget splashed out extra money for almost every sector deemed important to economic recovery (or politically sensitive). But with universities in a state of financial crisis, they missed out.
Strategic planning experts say public universities in developed countries can no longer depend on government funding, and must restructure to reduce costs and increase revenue or face failure.
South Africa’s economic challenges and the high number of students from poor and working class families call for a funding model that doesn’t create an affordability crisis for students and the state.
Not everyone needs to be on campus to learn. Governments, which subsidize higher education, need to change their funding models to support affordable remote learning.
The focus on rankings has been more a symptom than a cause of the challenge Australian universities face, namely a structural change in their revenue base.
The Australian government has dropped protections for language programs at a time when universities are announcing plans to end Asian languages courses. That’s a mistake in the Asian Century.
Educating international students provides far more benefits for Australia than is commonly acknowledged. But it has also created problems and an ambitious agenda is needed to overcome these.
A post-war funding crisis forced universities to take the initiative in making their case to the public. A new history explores how universities did it and the changes they brought about.
It’s one of the largest funding cuts to any university course, and will leave Australia ill-equipped to deal with the environmental challenges of the future.